Footloose in America: Dixie to New England (14 page)

I had to re-shoe Della that day. So it was almost three in the afternoon before we got on the road. At the edge of Morganfield, we passed a driveway where six teenaged boys were climbing into a Camero. They all had their ball caps on backwards and were waving at us, when one of them yelled, “Where ya going?”

Patricia shouted, “We’re going to Uniontown!”

Simultaneously, they all burst into laughter.

The road to Uniontown was a flat straight ribbon of asphalt that parted fields of autumn brown soybeans ready for harvest. Interspersed through the fields were several oil wells, most of which were pumping. Not far from mile-marker thirteen, we came to the intersection of Highway 666. The mark of the devil on the road to Uniontown.

Not far from there, a farmer in a pickup truck pulled into a soy bean patch next to us. He yelled out the window, “I read about you in the paper today.” Then he asked, “If you’re walking to New England, how come you’re going this way?”

“We’re going to Uniontown!”

With thumbs-up, he drove ahead to a combine that was stopped in the soybean patch. He was talking with four other men beside the combine as we approached. When we got close, he strolled toward the pavement and shouted, “Are you guys crazy? You ought to ride in that thing.”

I yelled back, “If we’re crazy enough to go to Uniontown, we’re crazy enough to walk!”

All five of them doubled over with laughter.

When we started down off the ridge into town, it was immediately obvious why everyone questioned our detour. Unlike Morganfield, with its well-kept homes and manicured yards, Uniontown had hap-hazard trailers on scruffy lots and buildings that begged the question, “Does anyone live here?” Everything seemed temporary. Parked in nearly every yard was a car with a door open and no one around. And in the streets along the curb, there were several junkers with their hoods up but no one was working on them.

Then we came to that unmistakable smell of a recently burnt building. It got stronger the further we descended into town. Unlike the smell of a campfire or fireplace that coddles feelings of warmth and well-being, a burnt building has the stink of strife. It was a derelict smell that got stronger as we walked further into Uniontown. About three blocks from the signal light in the middle of town, we came to the smoldering ruins.

It had been a house trailer on a rock foundation. Yellow plastic tape was laced through trees and shrubs marking the perimeter of the fire. At the center was a smoking rectangular pile of rubble, around which were burnt pieces of furniture and bright plastic parts of children’s toys. A sense of melancholy was in the smell of that fire.

A late model pickup stopped, and the driver asked if we needed a place to put down for the night. I said, “Thanks, but we’re staying at Margaret’s house.”

“You mean Margaret on Third Street?”

“Yes. She said they have a big yard for our mule to graze in.”

It was almost dark, so I couldn’t see the driver’s expression. But I could hear the reservation in his voice. “Okay. Do you mind if I wait for you there so I can take some pictures?”

When we got to Margaret’s house, it was so dark it was hard to see her driveway. Normally, I would stop and check out the situation before I lead Della into a place like that. But that evening I just led her up onto
the driveway and into the yard. Immediately I realized I’d made a mistake. Margaret’s big front yard was barely large enough to play a game of croquet in. Even if it had been bigger you couldn’t have played there because of all the shrubs everywhere. Della would tear the place up in no time.

Margaret’s husband, Willie, said, “Don’t worry about it! Just run those stupid little trees over. We don’t care.”

He was sitting on the front steps dressed in only shorts and sandals. A huge bundle of flesh hung over the top of the shorts and his thighs stressed their seams. Willie had a beer can in his hand and a New Jersey accent in his voice. “We didn’t plant the damn things anyway. They just came up on their own. So you ain’t hurting nothing.”

The bushes weren’t the problem, it was the fenced yard. It wasn’t big enough to turn Della and the cart around in it. After I told him that, Willie stood and waddled toward me saying, “Aw, hell! We’ll just take the damn fence down. It ain’t much anyway.”

“I’m sorry, but this just isn’t going to work out for us.”

Margaret grabbed my arm and pleaded, “Will you still be my friend?”

The guy in the pickup who wanted to take pictures of us was a big man. His friend was too. So they had the bulk to help Della back the cart over the curb and out into the street. Willie was bigger than anyone there, but he said, “My knees can’t handle doing something like that.”

Margaret’s neighbor let us park the cart and stake out Della for the night in her unfenced yard. It didn’t have much to graze on, but we had plenty of hay.

After we got her situated for the night, Patricia and I went next door to Margaret and Willie’s house. She fixed us a dinner of cornbread, beans and cream style corn from a can. Willie brought out a couple cans of Busch beer.

Willie was fifty-three, and Margaret was ten years older. She described herself as, “A real mess. But I love people and I have fun!”

Willie was a salesman from Jersey City who followed a job to Kentucky a few years back. When the job came to an end he returned to New Jersey. “But I couldn’t handle Jersey no more. I got spoiled here. You don’t make
as much money, but who cares. Here you can really live. In Jersey you just survive. You have to put bars on your windows and you don’t look at nobody you don’t know. Here everybody waves and says ‘Hi.’ Back in Jersey they’d think you was crazy, or trying to rob ’em or something.”

Willie was a telemarketer and in awe of the people in Uniontown. “These are real men around here. If their pickup breaks down, they fix it right alongside the road. No calling Triple--A. If their roof blows off, they get the stuff and fix it. Back in Jersey City, nobody does that. Here they do it themselves. Now that’s what I call real men!”

I told Willie about the negative remarks we heard about Uniontown. “Aw, that’s all them people up in Morganfield. They think they’re more sophisticated. They call Uniontown the ghetto. Hell, they don’t know what a ghetto is. I do. They ain’t never seen real sophistication. But I have. I’m from Jersey City. I know what sophistication is, and Morganfield ain’t got it!”

Normally Willie and Margaret didn’t sleep in the same room. If Willie was startled awake he would come up screaming and punching. One time, back when they did sleep in the same bed, he banged her up pretty bad. After that they slept in separate rooms. But the night we were there Margaret insisted we take her bed. She would chance sleeping with Willie.

“How do they know we aren’t ax murderers?”

Patricia whispered the question as we laid in the dark bedroom. Everyone in the house had just settled down for the night. I whispered back, “What are you talking about?”

“I was just laying here thinking, they really don’t know us, and yet they invite us to stay in their home. How do they know we aren’t ax murderers?”

“
Invite
? It’s more like she begged. Hey, that’s it! Maybe Margaret’s an ax murderer. That’s why she made such a big deal about us coming here. She and Willie are going to get us while we’re asleep.”

My wife poked me in the ribs with her elbow. “Oh shush. They might hear you.”

Then she pulled back the covers and whispered, “I’ve got to pee.”

The door to the bathroom was halfway down the hall on the left. The door to Willie’s room was directly across from it. In the dark, as Patricia
tiptoed toward it, she could hear voices in Willie’s room. When she reached for the bathroom doorknob, she heard him say, “How do we know they aren’t ax murderers?”

In the morning, we moved our camp to the Uniontown city park. It’s adjacent to a levee that protects the town from the Ohio River. On the other side of the levee, in the bottoms, was a dense forest. Hardwoods, willows and vines that were woven with bits of plastic, pieces of metal and debris of all description from high-waters gone by.

After we set up camp and staked out Della in a patch of lush grass, Patricia and I climbed on our bikes and took off to explore Uniontown. Before we left, we took extra precautions to secure everything we owned. We kept hearing how bad the thieves were in Uniontown. A seventy-two year old woman, who had lived in the area all her life, warned us. “Uniontown is a den of thieves! It’s always been that way. They even stole an elephant here one time.”

According to her, in the late 1800’s one of the locals stole an elephant from a traveling circus. In the dead of the night he swam across the Ohio River with the pachyderm and sold it in Indiana to pay off a gambling debt.

Uniontown got its name when the hamlets of Francisburg and Locust Point merged as one community in the mid 1800’s. The first settlers were trappers and loggers. Then coal was discovered on that part of the river.

The 1937 flood was a turning point in Uniontown’s history. On February 1
^st
, the Ohio River was 64.2 feet above flood stage. There was no levee then. But even if there had been, it wouldn’t have made much difference. Willie told me when the Ohio flooded in 1997, he could sit on the top of the levee and slap the water.

“If we’d gotten another inch of rain it would have been all over for us down here.”

In the 1997 flood the river crested eleven feet lower than it did in 1937.

Fire also shaped the history of Uniontown. In 1975 a blaze swept through most of the downtown historic buildings. They were replaced with un-ornate, single-story structures. Like the house trailers and parked cars we saw when we walked into town, these buildings had a sense of temporary about them.

That afternoon, during our tour, we stopped at the VFW for a beer. The bartender told us what really killed Uniontown was when the coal mines shut down. The first one was in 1988.

“We had five good mines with plenty of work for anyone who wanted it.”

The man next to us at the bar said, “Now if you want work, you have to go to Morganfield, or Henderson, or over to Evansville. That’s what’s really killing Uniontown.”

So why does anyone live in Uniontown? It will always have the threat of flood. You have to drive somewhere else to work. The crime rate is high and esthetically the place is hardly attractive. So why live there? To quote Margaret, “It’s home. I’m comfortable here. I wouldn’t live anywhere else.”

The next morning after breakfast, Patricia and I drank our last cup of coffee while we watched Della graze near the levee. Suddenly, two large dogs jumped up onto the top of it from the other side and started barking. It surprised Della and she bolted. With hobbles on her front feet she leaped away from the levee. In mid-air she came to the end of her rope, which made her flip head over hooves. When she hit the ground it was square on the top of her head, and as the rest of her body crashed down I heard something crack. For a frightening moment, she laid completely still as my body began to shiver. Had Della just broken her neck?

Patricia and I both screamed “Della!” as we scrambled toward her. But just before we got her Della shuddered, rolled over and up onto her feet.